A cryptic crossword expert is uprooted from suburban England to rural Pennsylvania. How will he fare in the land of Aleros, ERAs and Oreos?

Saturday, June 6, 2009

NPR Puzzle 5/31/09 -- Solutions

This week's puzzle was

Take "Indian wrestle," rearrange the 13 letters to get three words that are all related. What are they? Hint: The word lengths are five, four and four letters, respectively.

The answer is Rain, Sleet, Wind.

These letters (ADEEIILNNRSTW) are very useful for making anagrams. I clearly had fun working as many continuous anagrams of our Bengali Dozen (well, there are thirteen of them...) into my post on Sunday as I could. But as a puzzle, this isn't my favorite sort. Either the answer just comes to you, or it doesn't and you have to work it out, which isn't very hard. I'll predict a lot of people sent in correct answers.

I didn't submit my answer, by the way. Dan's wife's experience the other day (check the comments here) suggests that that unheralded production assistant or unpaid intern whose job it is to phone the winner picks a specific correct solution selected at random, calls that telephone number and if no one picks up, picks another correct solution at random and calls the number for that solver until someone picks up.

Well, I'm in a meeting on Thursday afternoons at 3 p.m., and it's the sort of meeting you don't take your cell phone to. So I don't bother to submit my solution to these things. And I bet there are a lot of people who don't. And none of us is ever going to win the lapel pin, hunh?

Here are the answers this week's value-added puzzle:

Think of two-word phrases that share a word starting with Z, such that the Z-word comes after the first word, and comes before the second word below:

Petting zoo & zookeeperGround zero & zero hourTime zone & zone outPlains zebra* & zebra print (*valid, but not common -- which is actually a hint, as a common zebra is different from the plains zebra. Okay, okay, so this was obscure -- I was hoping people would get it from zebra print. Ross didn't, but then he's had a horrible cold all week. Feel better soon, sweetie!)Celestial zodiac & Zodiac Killer